


Reconstructed

by ungoodpirate



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Force Ghost Obi-Wan, Gen, Reincarnation, Rey is Anakin's Reincarnation, Rey-Centric, post-TFA
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-15 21:38:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5801191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ungoodpirate/pseuds/ungoodpirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Rey found Luke Skywalker, it felt like she'd finally found what she had been aching for all along, during every lonely night on Jakku. However, a month into her training, she started having terrible dreams about murder and pain... dreams that might be connected to her lightsaber's original owner. On top of that, Luke and the oddly familiar spirit Ben Kenobi seem to know something she doesn't.</p><p>A story about Rey, a girl who goes being no one to carrying the weight of the past and future on her shoulders as she comes to understand identity and forgiveness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am actually 100% Team Rey Skywalker. I believe and want her to be Luke's daughter, but I ran across the 'Rey is Anakin's Reincarnation' theory and it intrigued me enough to fic it.

The first night on Ahch-To Rey couldn’t sleep. After so many lonely nights on Jakku with only the promise of dreams of this place, of oceans and islands, as temptation to close her eyes against the surrounding loneliness… after all that, those dreams were real. What did she need sleep for anymore? 

She pushed up from her pallet. Luke’s, against the other wall of the shelter, was empty. If neither of them were sleeping, perhaps she could get some answers questioned. Today had mostly been her answering his. 

When she found Luke in the temple ruins, he was already talking to someone. Odd, because according to the scans they did on the Millennium Falcon during descent, they should be the only humanoid life on the planet. 

The temple, the first Jedi temple, couldn’t be considered a building anymore. It was just stone slabs making  up grass-cracked floors and lopped-sided walls. She stopped behind a pillar when she heard Luke’s voice. She peaked around the edge to see his face cast in a blue-ish light, but couldn’t lean far enough without being discovered to see whom he was speaking to.  

So she listened. 

“I don’t know, Ben,” Luke said. “There’s something strange about her. Something familiar.” 

Whoever it was she couldn’t see from her hiding spot, replied, “Search your feels, and you will come to understand the truth of who she is.” 

With a touch of amusement, Luke said, “You can never just tell me, can you?” 

Rey crept back to her sleeping place, head dizzy with new thoughts: Who was Luke talking to and what did he mean? And why could she swear she had heard the mystery man’s voice before?

…

She had cried. When she held the lightsaber out to Luke Skywalker -- the myth -- pleading silently for him to train her. To accept her. He too had been staring back at her intently. 

Although her heart still mourned Han Solo’s death and ached with worry for Finn, there was something about this man she hadn’t even know was real just weeks ago… something, even just standing in his presence, made her feel like he was the one she was searching for all this time. 

…

The first thing Luke taught her was meditation. 

“I’ve come to think it’s the most important skill for a Jedi to learn. Although… I know it’s not very interesting when you’re young.” 

It wasn’t interesting, but Rey was so used to spending every second of her days just in the acts of keeping herself alive that she didn’t begrudge sitting in the grass for long hours. On this planet the breeze was soft and cool as feather touch and the sun was warming instead of harsh. The air itself smelled alive, carrying the scents of dirt and plants and salty ocean. 

“I like it here,” she said, her words slipping out without even thinking. 

“It’s a good place to commune with the Force,” Luke said from beside her. 

She peaked her eyes open and watched his calm face. “Is that you chose here to hide?”

“I wasn’t hiding,” Luke said, with barely a twitch at the accusation. “I was waiting.”

Unsatisfied, Rey asked, “For what?” 

“I wasn’t sure,” he said. “But I knew it would come.”

Rey pinched her lips, made a face that displayed all of the skepticism she wasn’t saying. Luke, perhaps, sensed it coming off her in waves. The corner of his mouth twitched up in a grin. 

“You came.”

…

She found Luke’s old X-wing being taken over by vines in a nearby valley. She cleared them away and then got the hood up, wondering if it could be salvaged and what had rusted out. Luke found her there, tinkering with the motivator, well past the time she was supposed to be back. 

If she expected to be chastised, it didn’t come. 

“Where did you learn how to do that?” he asked her. 

She shrugged after she dropped back down to the ground. “Taught myself.” She rubbed her grease stained thumb on her pants. “I was scavenger back on Jakku. I had to know which parts were which, what was valuable… I had to tear things apart. I always liked the idea of putting them together better.”

Luke raised his mechanical hand and laid it on the X-wing’s hull fondly. Rey stared at the hand, overwhelmed by a strange sense of guilt. 

“I’m good pilot,” she burst out, in retaliation against her own confused emotions. 

“So was I,” Luke said, and that fondness was there in his voice too. “Perhaps we can get her flying again.” 

Rey grinned, completely, fully, overwhelmed in an entirely different direction.

…

“Hello.”

Rey startled. An apparition of man -- blue and immaterial -- stood before her mediation spot, a stone partition that was once part of a wall. 

“Who are you?” she asked instead of demanding explanation for what he was because it was  _ that voice.  _

“I’m Ben Kenobi,” he said.

She squinted, recalling something she’d been told. “You trained Master Luke.”

He nodded. “And his father.”

Rey set her hands on her knees, leaned forward. “Isn’t Kylo Ren’s name Ben too?

This Ben blinked, slowly, sad, and replied, “His parents thought to honor an old fool by naming their son after me.” 

“Old fool?” she said with a huff. “You’re a Jedi.” 

“Even Jedi’s make mistakes. Sometimes rather big ones. Remember that, Rey.”

At the sound of him speaking her name, Rey scrambled down from the wall to get closer to him. “Your voice,” she said. “I knew I had heard it before. I heard you in my vision.”

“Is that so?” he said, and he stroked the corner of his mustache. 

“Why were you in my vision?”  she demanded, although she had little clue what most it had been about anyway.

“That’s something you’ll have to discover for yourself,” Ben said. He nodded at the lightsaber hanging from her belt, “But I’ve had quite a history with that lightsaber as well, although I never wielded it.” 

Rey touched the saber’s hilt, somewhat possessive and self-conscious. 

Her name echoed in the air as Luke called for her from the top of the hill. She glanced over her shoulder and when she looked back at Ben Kenobi he was fading into the dipping sunlight. Before he disappeared completely, he said, “If you prefer, you can call me Obi-Wan.” 

“Obi-Wan,” she tested on her tongue and it felt right. 

He was gone, but she felt a promise of ‘next time’ like a whisper. 

…

A month into the training -- hours of meditation, X-wing rebuilding, lightsaber forms, endurance runs, rock floating -- she awoke to searing pain across her entire body. 

It was so visceral it still tingled against her skin as the images faded from her mind, replaced with the night sky. She clutched at her arms past her elbows and her legs past her knees to check if they were still there, real, flesh. She touched her own face. She was drenched with sweat but her skin was unmarred.  

It had been a dream of being dismembered. It had been a dream of being burned. 

It was what lead her to have the nerve to ask the next day a quandary that had settled in her skull for a long while and hadn’t left. 

“How did you lose --?” She motioned to Luke’s mechanical hand. 

Luke flexed it, looked it and then her. 

“I lost it in a duel with Darth Vader,” he answered.

Rey blinked, wide-eyed. Like Luke, Darth Vader too had been a myth to her, a monster type, a name evoked to warn against misbehavior. Although the remains of battles remained in Jakku’s deserts -- were her life blood -- the the old Galactic Empire seemed so distant from Jakku. The entire galaxy seemed parsecs away from that desolate planet and what had been her desolate life on it. Everything beyond her own two eyes had been a myth. 

“How did you survive?” she asked. Losing a hand seemed like a devastating blow.

“Vader would have never killed me,” Luke said, slowly, like when he picked fruit from the trees down the ridge, examining each with care before plucking them away. “He was my father.” 

So the myth twisted in a way she didn’t expect. Luke sat her down and explained about a man named Anakin Skywalker -- whose saber Rey carried, whose saber  _ had called _ to her --  a once hero and Jedi Knight, who had fallen prey to the dark side, and who, with nothing to gain, for the love of his son -- a son who believed in the good in him -- turned on the Emperor to save his son’s life. With that final act of love, of redemption, for which he gave his own life, had returned to the light side of the Force.

Rey stretched and curled her own hands as she thought about the mechanical man in his story and her dream of losing all limbs. 

“How did you know he would turn back from the the dark side? How did he know he would save you?”

“I knew there was good in him,” Luke said. “I knew it. I still know it.” 

…

Her lightsaber sliced through neck of an old man staring up at her with horrored, betrayed eyes. Through an alien being, begging ‘No, no, no, please.’ Through a child. Children. Lots of them. She awoke sobbing like she hadn’t since she was a child, reckless and loud.

Luke was there, sooner than she could realize, curling an arm around her shoulder, sitting with her, as she regained her breath. 

“It wasn’t like the what I saw on Takodana,” she said, using the tail of her jacket to wipe her face. She had of course told Luke about that vision when she had first touched his old lightsaber. Who else was there to help her understand it? “I was an outsider in those. A witness to those horrible things… In this one, it was like it was my own memories.” She uncurled her fists on top of her knees, turned them palm up. “My own hands.”

“What does it mean?” she asked when Luke didn’t say anything. 

He stood. “It’s almost dawn. I’ll make breakfast.” 

…

She laid awake, like that first night, but this time sleep being a terror to her. It was quite an accident that she overheard Luke and Obi-Wan again. She had just gotten up for a walk, perhaps a turn going up and down the winding stairs could wear her out enough to sleep without dreaming. Luke was sleeping when she got up. He was awake and speaking when she returned, her calves burning from the hike. 

“Now that I know,” Luke said, as Rey stopped just askance the doorway of the shared little shelter. “I understand why you didn’t tell me about Vader. I’m so afraid that it will break her.” 

“She’s strong, Luke,” Obi-Wan said. 

Rey curled her hands into loose fists. Was she strong? For so long she’d only felt as if she were barely surviving. 

“But once she learns the truth of who she really is,” Obi-Wan continued, “She will need your guidance more than ever.”

Rey jerked, leaned in closer, barely resisting running in. What truth? Answers about her family? Or the dreams? 

“I’ve failed before,” Luke said.

Kylo Ren. 

“So have I,” said Obi-Wan. “But you were the one who believed in Anakin. You were the one who saved him. Remember that.” 

Rey’s fingernails bit into her palms as she tensed. She was on the edge of understanding  _ somethin _ g, almost leaping high enough, running fast enough, being wise enough…  She sagged where she stood. If only they would speak plainly.

Luke was still talking. Rey was sure she missed something. 

“... Do you think he did it… he  _ came back  _ on purpose?”

“The galaxy is still unbalanced.” Rey could just pictured him running a finger down the edge of his mustache as he said that, knowing his mannerisms although she’d only seen him once. “The ramifications of Palpatine’s rule did not end with his death. Don’t you feel it?”  

“Yes.” 

“Perhaps this is the Force setting things right.”

…

Next time Obi-Wan appeared to her, Rey demanded straight out, “What are you and Master Luke hiding from me?”

“Patience, young one,” Obi-Wan said, not put off a second by her suddenness. “Patience… Although you were never good at patience.”

“Like that. What that does that mean?” 

When he didn’t reply, she huffed in irritation. “Fine. Tell about Luke’s father, then. Tell me about Darth Vader.” 

“Why would you want to know about him?”

Rey touched the saber at her hip. “This was his, he built it, and now it’s making me see things, giving me dreams. I think it has to with him.”

“That’s good insight, Rey. What would you like to know?”

“What was he like?”

Obi-Wan took a seat on a nearby stump. “Anakin Skywalker or Darth Vader?” 

“Aren’t they the same person?”

“In a way, yes. And in a way, no.”

Rey crossed her arms. “Anakin.” Vader, if only in myth form, she knew. 

“He was a natural pilot and mechanic since childhood, one of the strongest Force users in the history of the Jedi Order, grew into being one of the finest lightsaber duelist in our time, and… was like a  brother to me.” 

“What happened then? How did he…? Why did he -- ?”

“Fall to the dark side? I can’t say that I completely know his mind, and I knew him better than most others. Anakin was always as arrogant and volatile as he was brave and daring. Darth Sidious, that is, Emperor Palpatine as you know him, preyed on Anakin from a young age. A Sith Lord right under the Jedi Council’s nose the whole time…” Obi-Wan shook his head in remembrance of their own folly.   

“How do you deal with it?” Rey asked. “How do you deal with him being a friend and a monster.” 

Obi-Wan stroked his beard for a moment. “In the old Jedi Order,” he said. “We were taught that once one went to the dark side there was no coming back. We were wrong. Luke believed there was good in his father. He gave Vader a chance, and Anakin took it… We were wrong about many things.”

He looked up at Rey, drawing himself out of his own regrets. “Forgiveness is a strange thing.” 

Rey sat down cross-legged beside him, longing to pat his shoulder in some form of consolation, but he was intangible and she couldn’t. Her mouth tasted sour. 

“You’re wrong, by the way,” she said, after sitting awhile in quiet. 

“Sorry?” 

“I waited for fourteen years on Jakku. I’m very good at patience.” 

A stunned expression crossed Obi-Wan’s face before settling on thoughtful. “Perhaps you’re right.”  

…

Over lunch, by the glow of the campfire, Rey admitted, “I think they’re Anakin Skywalker’s memories that I’m seeing.” 

Luke set down his bowl slowly and folded his hands in his lap. “I’ve come to the same conclusion.”

Rey bite the inside of her check to keep back the ‘Then why didn’t you say so.’ Obi-Wan she felt free to yell at. Luke was the only one in the galaxy that could teach her. She didn’t want to risk him leaving. Plus, it might be uncomfortable or bitter for Luke for her to be seeing these things about his father.

“He did some truly terrible things,” Rey said. “But he loved people too. His mother, his wife,... his children, as short of time as he knew you. I don’t just  _ see  _ these things in my dream, I feel them too, like they’re actually happening. I thought you should know that.” 

Luke’s eyes seemed to shine as he looked at her.

“I think the X-wings ready to fly,” he said. “If you want to test it?” 

“Really?” Rey said, perking up. 

Luke pointed out the controls to her as she sat in the cockpit. It was an older model, but she favored no doubt that she could fly it. 

When all was ready, she took to the air, making loops and twirls in the atmosphere and then diving so slow she could skim the water. She laugh-screamed in exhilaration as she made a particularly daring move through a natural rock archway. Once she was landed again, over an hour later, she felt so alive, she felt she would lift off the ground right then without any ship to aid her. 

…

“When I set out to find the first Jedi Temple, I found more than just this.”

They stood in what has once been the main council chamber, although it had mostly been taken over again by nature. There was some peaceful symmetry in that. 

“I found this as well.” He closed his eyes, outstretched an arm, and great stone slab lifted from the dirt. It drifted in the air several yards over, revealing behind it a doorway-like opening to a tunnel. 

Rey stepped up the threshold. “What’s down there?”

“A very strong concentration of the Force.” 

Rey looked askance at him, holding her to her spot even as she felt drawn forward like gravity itself pulled her in. 

“The light side or the dark side?”

“The Force is what you make of it,” Luke said. “But I think if you go down there and meditate, you will be given clarity.” 

Rey stalled there, digging the toes of her boots into the dirt, stuck in indecision. She longed for this, answers, an answer, to any of her life’s mysteries. But she also feared. 

Luke squeezed her shoulder. “You’re ready.”

Rey stepped forward. Ever since she left Jakku she had been stepping forward. It was no time to stop now. 

It was dark before she knew it, taking step after step. The doorway behind her was barely a torch-patch of light. Luke wasn’t with her. Of course she would have to do this alone. 

She guided herself with fingers against the wall, further and further, slowly downhill, her eyes adjusting to the dark until it was so dark she could barely see a thing. She heard water plinking and dribbling. Water -- always a beautiful sound to her, a child of the desert. 

The hallway widened into a room. She stepped forward into it and into a shallow pool. Was this what she was looking for? 

_ Yes, definitely _ , came a wordless response, a sensation, the same thing that lead her down here without tripping and without light.   

She sat at the edge of the pool, breathed in deep the musty air, and -- like being pulled again-- reached out with both hands and set her palms on the water’s surface. 

...

At nightfall, she stumbled out of the tunnel, landing on her knees as she gasped in fresh air and saw the colors of twilight in the sky. She curled her fingers into the grass. Luke was there, waiting for her. 

“I understand now.” She gulped. Her throat felt scour dry. “I understand. Those dreams, Anakin’s memories… they’re mine.”


	2. Chapter 2

Luke helped her to her feet, lead her to their shelter, got her settled down to sleep. She remembered this when she opened her itchy eyes the next morning. Her muscles ached. 

One blessing, it had been a dreamless sleep. But what did she need dreams taunting her for, now that she knew. 

Her time at the underground pool had knitted together that wisps of dreams and visions into one cohesive narrative. She knew the full story of Anakin Skywalker’s life now, because it was her own.

“You slept late,” Luke said when he sees her. Indeed, the sun was high in the sky. He handed her a cup of water and she drank greedily. 

“I had a lot to sleep on,” she said with a husk of a voice. Then, “You knew.” 

“I suspected,” Luke said. “From the moment you arrived here, you felt familiar. The Force pushed me to that conclusion, the same with you.” 

Rey clenched her jaw and nodded. She looked away quickly. She had a hard time looking him in the eye now, knowing the truth. Although kind, from the moment they met, his eyes seemed to absorb her thoroughly. 

Shame bubbled up in her gut. 

No wonder Luke was the answer to her yearning. He was the one teacher that existed in the galaxy, and her child, one of her biggest regrets and the spark of her redemption. He was her past and future and present. He had nothing to do with her beginnings in this body, but he was in fact her family. 

…

The lightsaber had called to Rey from the beginning. She weighed it now in her hands. She rubbed her thumb down the metal casing, feeling where it was nicked and where it was worn smooth. 

She pressed the button and the blade flared to life. She shifted her feet into the stance she’d been taught and started to move through the forms.

Back on Jakku, when she experimented with her staff, the worse that could happen If she messed up was jammed fingers, bruised shina, knots on her head. Against Kylo Ren, she had been flying on instinct, a need to defend and avenge, tapped into the Force. Since being on Ahch-To, she’d been less sure wielding the lightsaber. Good at it, especially for as little time she’d had training, but less sure. 

Today, she moved with quick, confident efficiency. Dispelling the logic of ‘be careful, you’re learning, don’t want to cut off anything by accident.’ She flowed the like the tides, in and out, steady and natural, like these were steps to a dance she was remembering, not learning new.

She repeated the katas until her breathing grew ragged, then dropped her arms and turned off the saber. 

“You move like Anakin.”

She spun around. “You,” she said at the sight of Obi-Wan standing there appraising her. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. “You knew too.”

Obi-Wan bowed his head in acknowledgement but didn’t seem ashamed.

“After his death, Anakin and I communed like this,” he motioned towards himself. “But after a time, he disappeared. I thought he had moved on, become one with the Force.”

“Instead he came back.” Rey swallowed. “As me.” 

Obi-Wan nodded again. “Although I doubt he did this with intention. They’re something bigger at work here. He was the Chosen One, and his destiny was not completed in his lifetime.”

“So I have to inherit it,” Rey said. 

Obi-Wan squinted at her, perceiving. “This is not a curse, Rey, but a blessing. It’s a rare few that get another lifetime to make tangible change in the galaxy.”

Rey turned away. He too had eyes that saw through her. “It’s doesn’t feel like a blessing,” she said. “Just... months ago I was no more than Rey. I had nothing. I was no one. Now I have all this on my shoulders.”

“Did you find being ‘no one’ a blessing?” Obi-Wan asked. 

Of course she hadn’t. It had been it’s own curse, the wandering futility of her life, the loneliness that pressed in from every angle. In her look for answers, though, she hadn’t wanted to be cured with such a bitter medicine.

“At least I knew my place in the galaxy…” As an orphan, scavenger, living hand-to-mouth, without a single sentient being existing to care if she lived or died. 

Nothing had been easy since she’d taken her first flight off Jakku. 

“He was stubborn too,” Obi-Wan said. Rey shot him a quick glare, and stomped off. 

…

Chewie had left with the Falcon a few days after they first made contact on Ahch-To to help the Resistance move its base. He had left some supplies, including a long range holo-transmitter. Six months into Rey’s training, one week after her visit to the pool, they received a message on it from General Organa, asking politely but with definite command, that they bring themselves back to civilization now that the Resistance had caught wind of the FIrst Order’s newest scheme. 

As if there was a choice in the matter, the General added that Chewie was already on his way back to pick them up. 

Neither Luke nor Rey had much to pack. 

“What do I tell the General?” Rey asked as they watched the Falcon descend from the atmosphere. “About who I am. I never got to -- he -- I --”  _ never got to apologize _ . 

“His actions aren’t yours to carry,” Luke said.

She was too nervous to argue.

…

Chewie let her pilot the Falcon on the way back. For a moment, between here and there, she felt at home. 

…

Leia greeted Luke with a warm hug. Rey recalled the embrace she had shared with the General when she first saw the woman, after surviving Starkiller Base, after Han’s death. Although they exchanged no words, they knew each other’s pain on sight. The work of the Force, probably, but looking back with her new knowledge, the memory felt tainted.

Even now, after releasing Luke, Leia turned to Rey. She cupped Rey’s face to get a good look at her and then took her hands, gave them a squeeze. “You look good, kid,” she said. 

Rey longed to drop in a lava pit. Well, again. 

Someone called her name across the landing pad. She turned. It was Finn. He was running towards her, and she ran to meet him. He caught her in a hug that lifted her off her feet. She laughed, all worries momentarily displaced. 

No, this. This was home. 

“You’re all right,” she said. She was beaming. She could feel her own smile on her face. 

“And you,” he said back. Of course, the last he had seen her they had been in middle of a fight with Kylo Ren. 

“So much has happened since then,” Rey said, but she couldn’t fathom where to start. 

Finn checked over his shoulder. “I think the General is about to call a meeting now that you two arrived.”

“That’s quick.”

“No rest for the Resistance,” he said, and lead to her hangar where everyone was congregating. 

Finn found seats for them and asked in a hush as they were settling down, “What’s he like, Luke Skywalker?” 

“He’s actually… quite normal.” And immensely kind. And special. But those were harder to explain.

Finn couldn’t ask any follow up questions as the room silenced when General Organa entered. 

…

Scouts discovered First Order ships assembling near the Outer Rim, well out of the Unknown Regions they retreated to for safety after Starkiller Base’s destruction. With the Republic fleets gone, and the Republic itself in shards, they hadn’t the ships or manpower to pursue them after their acts of war. The Resistance had spent these months amassing supplies and calling on the planets of the barely-there Republic for military aid in their fight. 

Now the First Order had crept out of the shadows of space. Intelligence believed that the target was Naboo, to conquer not destroy. It was Mid-Rim, making it closer that the Outer Rim planets the First Order had gotten hold of, and a symbolic victory, being the home planet of the late Emperor. 

“People are scared,” the General said, pacing the floor as she spoke, hands clasped behind her back. “And rightly so, but it our job not to give in to fear. We need to remember what we fight for.” She paused as the crowd shouted out their own answers: The Republic, Freedom, Peace. 

“And most importantly, who we fight for.” 

People sombered up at that, though Rey heard people muttering names like prayers around her. 

The General dismissed the large group with a order to meet with their direct commanders. 

“Sorry, gotta go,” Finn said as he got up. He was part of the Resistance now, she realized. He had found a place. 

…

Later, Rey and Finn sat on a hill at the edge of the base, watching the sunset, eating the dinner that carried out there on trays from the mess. He listened and didn’t judge -- they were each other’s first friends -- as she told him absolutely everything. 

“That sounds crazy,” he said when she was finished. He wasn’t calling her crazy. 

“It is,” she agreed, picking pieces of grass to do something with her hands. “And it’s like… I feel responsible for all this.” She stared out the skyline and had no need to clarify. They were in the middle of a war. Of course Finn understood her. “I couldn’t run away from this even if I wanted to. I don’t have a choice.” 

“Of course you have a choice,” Finn retorted, quickly, with passion. He scooted closer to her. “Look, do you think I’m still here because they nursed me back to health? They made it clear that I didn’t owe them anything. That they could get me to whatever planet I wanted to go. That they  _ owed me _ for Starkiller Base.” Finn laughed like he was astounded by this still.

“But I chose to stay,” he said, as the sun slipped it’s last sliver below the horizon. “And not just because running away from the First Order is futile, but because I found something worth fighting for here. I might be a soldier again, but… let me tell you, Rey, there’s nothing more different from being a stormtrooper than being here.” 

Rey laid her head on FInn’s shoulder as the sky slowly inked darker. “I’ve missed you,” she said again, and she didn’t think she’d ever stop saying it. 

…

Rey leaned into the wrench with the full weight of her body, making the bolt budge centimeter by centimeter. Her muscles twitched when she finally dropped her arms. She leaned her forehead against the Falcon’s cool metal walling. 

The Resistance had won the space battle of Naboo, but they had lost a third of their fleet for the trouble. The FIrst Order retreated, but in retreating had preserved themselves to strike again. Who knew what resources they had out in the Unknown Regions.  The Resistance didn’t have the firepower to pursue them.

Every vIctory was fragile and temporary and tempered by so many loses. 

“Rey? You in here?” 

She jerked upright, drowsy, trying to remember the next item to fix on her mental to do list. 

Luke rounded the corridor, finding her. “Finn was about to organize a search party,” he said lightly, teasing. “Come on. Take a break.” 

“I’m just trying to…”  _ keep moving, _ so she didn’t have to think about it. Didn’t have to feel…  every death the battle brought. Now that she was so connected with the Force, each one felt like a jab with fire-hot poker into her very soul. 

She should have been able to do more, better, faster. The Empire should have never risen in the first place, leaving the First Order to rise from its remains, both greedy death-bringers of regimens. And whose fault was it. 

Her breath hitched on the intake. “It’s just so much…” She wavered between her two feet and grabbed at the fabric of her tunic right over her heart. A sob caught in her throat. “It’s so much, what I’m carrying.  It’s so heavy.” She has so much more she wanted to confess. She ducked her head, wanted to pull out her own hair. She heaved on air, this pain beyond words. 

Luke settled a hand on her shoulder. Perhaps realizing this -- this aloof kindness -- wasn’t enough, he then wrapped his arms around her completely, steading her in an embrace. 

He spoke into her ear. “When I learned that Vader was my father, I didn’t take it with serenity. I felt that burden. But I realized, in time, that it wasn’t mine.” 

“But this is mine,” she choked out. “It is!” 

This is why she came back, after all. This was the only sense Rey could make of it: to fix what was broken.

“It’s not!” He protested, so righteous and true, she felt it like a wave through the Force, stunning her still. He stepped back, held her shoulders firm at an arm’s length and looked her in the eye. “Listen, Rey… Your destiny is your own. The only actions you’re responsible for are the ones who make in this lifetime.” 

But then why would she be haunted by memories and why would she have been reborn in the first place if hadn’t been meant to carry the past. 

“You and Obi-Wan,” Rey said, her voice still raspy, “Act like this is a good and easy thing. I went from having no past, no legacy, to… to have the worse one in the history of the galaxy.”

“I do understand,” Luke said, but Rey shook her head. It wasn’t the same. Being the child of monster is a different weight than the having the same soul as one. 

Seeing her stubbornness, Luke said, “Darth Vader did terrible things, it’s true. But Vader isn’t the one who came back to set things right. Anakin Skywalker is.”  Then he demanded it was time for her to go to bed.

…

“But they’re the same person,” Rey told Finn, the next day, frustrated, recounting the conversation. Obi-Wan had commented similarly of this duality. He hadn’t contacted her since Luke and her had left Ahch-To. She missed him.

“I don’t know,” Finn said. “It kind of makes sense.”

“How?” she asked, scandalized.

He shrugged. “Well, FN-2187 and Finn are the same person but the moment I became Finn I started living an entirely different life, and… I feel different too.” He tilted his chin up and said, more sure, “I am different.”

“Don’t you feel different too?” he asked. “From Rey the scavenger who had never left Jakku to Rey the Jedi who flies all across the galaxy?”

Rey shrugged. “I guess.”  

The Rey of Jakku was still sunburnt into her skin. Rey the lonely, pained with waiting for someone that never came, who survived because she must. Yes, she had shifted. Her life, like Finn’s, was now a new one. But she carried the Rey of Jakku with her. That was the mud from which she had been molded. If anything right now there was an odd comfort in still being who she was before she was thrown headlong into all this… all this destiny and purpose and power.

She was still Rey. Still Rey. That was something she could hold onto. 

…

“We’re fighting a losing battle,” Leia said to them in the confinements of her chambers, “If we keep waiting for the First Order to make the first moves.” 

Luke leaned in. “You mean you want to take the fight to them?” 

Leia nodded in one, firm duck of the chin. 

“But I can’t just send the Resistance fleets into the Unknown Regions without a plan or destination.”

“You need information,” Luke said. The prolonged eye contact between the siblings made Rey sure they were having a conversation Rey wasn’t privy to. 

“What ships they have, how many, where their bases are, if they building another Starkiller…”

Luke nodded now. “I’ll go,” he said. He turned to Rey. “It’ll be very dangerous. I can’t ask you to come while you’re still training --”

“Wait,” Rey said, contesting. “What are you even planning to do?”

“A small ship, especially one manned by someone who can make people forget they ever saw him, could slip into First Order territory undetected,” Leia explained. 

“But,” Luke added. “They’ll be no backup, no way to call for help, no way to know the ship won’t be shot down on first sight, nowhere to resupply, and if caught…”

“I want to go,” Rey said. Luke and Leia shared a glance. Rey huffed. “If this is a way to stop the fight, stop the death, bring peace, then I want to help.” She targeted her gaze right at Luke, “You could use at least a little bit of back up.”

Luke didn’t argue with her. Neither of them did. Perhaps Luke wanted her to come with him all along, and he was just checking to make sure she really wanted to. 

Within the next hour, preparations for the mission began. 

…

“General, can I talk to you?”

“What is it, Rey?”

“I’m sorry if this is… insensitive, but I need to know.”

Leia titled her head. “It’s about Ben, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” 

“Let’s walk,” Leia said, putting a hand on Rey’s shoulder, guiding her along beside her. Once they passed a half length of the hanger, Leia asked, “What did you need to know?” 

“There’s a chance that on this mission we’ll cross paths.” 

Leia nodded.

Rey swallowed, and said, “Would you forgive him -- take him back -- if he could be saved?”

Leia’s pace faltered. “I wasn’t expecting that,” she said. “But --,” she squeezed her eyes shut. “I must put the needs of the Resistance, of the galaxy, first. The First Order must be stopped.” 

“But if you could do both,” Rey continued, breathless and rushed, “If there was a chance, as irrational as it sounds, would you?” 

Leia stopped walking. “Yes,” she said. “Despite everything he’s done. Despite --”  _ Han. _

Rey nodded to show she understood. 

Leia cleared her throat. “He’s still my son. He was so young when Snoke started preying on him, and I failed to protect him. He’s my son and I love him, and I know there’s still good in him, and as irrational as it sounds, yes, I would forgive him. I would take him back.” 

“Forgiveness is a strange thing,” Rey said, echoing Obi-Wan’s words. 

Leia nodded again. Rey felt the pain reverberating off Leia, unshielded. Rey longed to apologize for every wrong committed from her previous life, but it was an ill-fitting time and place. To bring it up now would only cause Leia to hurt more.

…

Three days later, outside their rickety ship, an old salvaged merchant’s vessel, Finn and Rey share their goodbyes. How short their time was together and yet Rey found Finn to be the most important she knew in this life so far. 

Rey hated goodbyes, ever since that one when she was child, the one given to her by a family who never came back. 

“We’ll see each other again,” Finn said, but neither could promise this. Only hope it. 

“Be safe,” he added. 

“You too.”

BB-8 came whistle-beeping up to them at a speed like he was afraid he was going to miss her departure. 

Rey kneeled down next to the droid. “You keep yourself safe as well, BB-8.” 

BB-8 booped affectionately.

When they took off, Rey wiped away a single sting of tear from the corner of her eye. Space was beautiful and immense, and she felt so small in it. That wasn’t why she was crying at all. 

With Luke in the pilot seat and her in the co-pilot, she pushed back her shoulders, and stealed herself for this next adventure. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I loved writing the Finn and Rey scenes. Can they be best friends forever, please? (kinda ship it too, but that won't be explored in this fic) 
> 
> How you enjoyed this installment! Feedback is always appreciated!!!

**Author's Note:**

> This will be one or two more chapters. I have much of it written already. Future chapters will have Leia, Finn, and Kylo Ren. There will be no Rey ships in this story, so don't worry about it running into any NOTP directions.


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